Danica Kragic

Croatian-born Danica Kragic is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Communication at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, KTH. She is the Director of the Centre for Autonomous Systems and her research is in the area of robotics, computer vision and machine learning. Kragic has been a visiting researcher at both Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University in the U.S.

As for hobbies, Kragic calls herself a “sewing junky”!

Danica says:

“We have big changes in terms of the development of machines that are faster, execute faster, compute faster, but we also have the ability to store knowledge and to use knowledge in a different way than we could do back in the 60s.

The sensors are also developing. We can sense and measure different properties of the environment in a better way. We can draw parallels with the gaming industry. We have devices that are interactive and can track our bodies so we can be a more integral part of the game.

Re: autonomy
You don’t necessarily know yet what potential problems will be occurring since we don’t have these types of very complex robots deployed in homes. The right way of starting is starting to deploy robots in industrial settings. The dynamics of the environment are very limited. We need to look into what is the human factor? This non-trained user interacting with this very advanced robot. What are the expectations?

It will be very much the question, how autonomous will they be? The standardisation issue there is very important. How do we standardize borders and allow them to learn? But also how do we assess them? Lots of things are happening in that area of software verification.

I would say robot trends are the following: Asia is into entertainment robots and Europe is into function robots and U.S. is into lots of military robots.

I hope this will be the workplace of the future, people working closely with robots there as a third or fourth hand. “